Viral Ad Network

The Viral Ad Network is growing rapidly (yay!) and that means we are looking to add to our Bristol-based publisher team.

This is an extremely important part of VAN that looks after our bloggers and website owners; providing them with great ad campaigns that pay them well, and ultimately providing our advertisers with views for their campaigns on awesome sites.

So what’s the job like:

This is a great way to get started in the industry. You get to work on great campaigns for big clients, and you’ll pick up key skills in account management, planning, media buying and reporting. We hope you’ll stick around for a couple of years, but we’ll train you in ways that give you a great preparation to step up to your next position (whether it’s internal or external).

The role has three key responsibilities:

• • Help build our network of quality online publishers
  • Support the campaign management team with delivery of clients campaigns
  • Support the sales team with publisher input for pitching

In detail…

• • Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from desired categories to sign up to the network
  • Assessing and processing incoming publisher signups.
  • Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching
  • Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
  • Help to grow VAN’s publisher community with relevant marketing & events.
  • Ensure VAN publisher inventory meets individual campaign targets.

What you’re like:

This is a job for people who:

• • Are comfortable with numbers, especially straightforward arithmetic.
  • Enjoy talking to people by phone and email to develop relationships.
  • Work hard (cliche, but true here). It’s a job where you need to get your tasks done to time. It can also be necessary to check campaign progress out of office hours (using online systems).
  • Have solid writing skills: we don’t have time to check your spelling etc, and we’re working with publishers who may judge us negatively if you can’t write clearly and accurately.

The type of work is fairly consistent and suits someone who is happy to do similar tasks on a daily basis. That said, the job is exciting: new opportunities come up, new relationships will be formed, we get sales wins and awesome content to seed, and campaigns need to get their views.

You will definitely need:

• • A genuine desire to get stuck into work and take responsibility.
  • A passion for online publishing. You need to be an active consumer of digital, and experience writing or running a blog would be great.
  • Previous work experience, this can be anything dealing with people or a task based role. It doesn’t have to be relevant to marketing or online, but we don’t have time to teach you the most basic professional and get-things-done skills.

Salary and progression

• • Within the role, you can progress from ‘novice’ to ‘ninja’. This would take a couple of years. A complete novice starts on £14.4k, and a ninja would get around £25k.
  • There’s healthy profit share on top for all staff (linked to company performance), and a success club (team rewards for making monthly sales target).
  • There’s a wide range of progression opportunities when it’s time to move on from this role. There may be opportunities to move up within VAN taking management responsibility for aspects of sales or operations, or moving elsewhere within the Team Rubber group. It’s also a great stepping stone into agencies or client-side marketing, giving a solid grounding in account management, media planning and buying, and campaign operations.

Interested? To apply mail ally@viraladnetwork.net with a covering letter outlining why you think you are suitable for the position and where your strengths lie along with a 2 page CV.

Earlier this month YouTube officially launched Analytics, a super easy way to monitor the viewing audience for your content and maximize new opportunities for promotion.

The concept isn’t exactly a ‘new’ one, YouTube has been gathering user data for quite a while now and anyone familiar with YouTube Insights will probably recognise a lot of the information in these reports, but there are a couple of handy improvements worth a mention.

So what’s new?

The first things you’ll notice are the cosmetic changes, a more intuitive layout, nice simple colour scheme, new buttons and titles for reports. But YouTube Analytics is more than just a prettier version of insights. The new overview gives an instant summary of your overall channel performance and engagement, with easy access to detailed information about individual videos that offers a more precise understanding of your audience. The data filter allows you to break down reports by content, geography, and date. Also you can now discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions, allowing you to focus your marketing on the most popular types of content.

The YouTube Analytics Overview breaks down the full details of all the options available but I’ve outlined some of my favorite features below.

Audience Retention: Formerly called Hot Spots, this report shows how far viewers watch through your video, really useful stuff if you want to understand how engaged people really are.

It measures the number of views for every moment of the video, so you can see where people have skipped forward, replayed a section or switched off. (Pay close attention to the first 15 seconds of every clip as according to YouTube that’s when your viewers are most likely to drop-off.)

YouTube even allow you to play back your video in the report to see exactly how it corresponds to the peaks and valleys of the graph. It’s a great way to work out the parts of your video that work best and identify any points where people start to get bored – that way you can focus on making the kind of content that your audience appears to enjoy.

Estimated earnings: This is useful if you’re interested in making money from your YouTube channel. You can see your total estimated earnings from the net revenue from Google-sold advertising, the estimated earnings from auction sold advertising via AdSense for Video and the estimated earnings from Doubleclick advertising and any other YouTube-sold sources.

Playback Location / Traffic Sources Report: Formally called Discovery, this report helps distinguish between how viewers found a video, i.e. through a YouTube search, Twitter link etc and where a video is being watched. It’s quite useful if you’re embedding your video on sites other than YouTube.

Why is it important to measure video performance?

If you are serious about using YouTube as a marketing tool it’s essential to set some goals, do you want it to drive traffic to your website? Generate ad revenue? Raise brand awareness? Whatever your targets are, the reporting data from analytics will help you to develop a deeper understanding of your audience and strategies and make well informed decisions when creating new content.

So if you’ve never explored the monitoring stats behind your content then this is the time to start!